CHAPTER 1
Subconscious Motivations and Conditioning
I've been searching for something most of my life. I wasn't always consciously aware of this search, but I did always have the feeling that there was something amiss — something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I went about my life like everyone else, but I felt like a victim a lot of the time; it was as though the world was against me in many ways. Now and then I felt that I didn't like how other people went about their business or the way the world was going, but then we all feel like that at times, right?
I got depressed a lot during my life, even when I was in my teens, but especially in my twenties, when it felt that so much of my life was in turmoil. I married young in 1974; I was only seventeen, and my husband, who I'm still living with in love and happiness, was only nineteen. Being the ages we were, we thought we knew it all. We presumed ourselves to be as wise as our parents if not more so, and we felt that we were completely competent to be able to have children and provide for them adequately. Well, as you can probably guess, we were certainly not as worldly-wise as we thought ourselves to be, and there were many lessons to be learnt, I can tell you.
Our first child was born five months after we married so we were very young parents, but we had the support of our families, and we managed as best we could. Being unqualified, my husband worked in factory jobs, which didn't pay well. We rented a small flat, and we dreamed of owning our own home one day. A few job changes and rental properties later, our second child arrived in 1975. I found a job in a blanket factory; I would put the girls in the double pram and walk across a paddock that was as bumpy as anything where the cows had walked through the soft soil, then I would leave the youngest at my cousin's house and take the eldest with me to work, where there was a day-care facility. We moved houses a few months later, too far from my cousin's place, so I had to take both girls to the day-care, and to get there I had to walk about a kilometre and then hop on the back of the factory lorry, pram and all, that had bench seats on it for the workers. I think back now to how hard I had it, but at the time I just did what I had to do.
Neither my parents nor my in-laws owned their own homes, so there was no financial backup for us if we ever got ourselves into strife. It was up to us to make ends meet no matter what. I found myself alone a lot in the early days, as my husband liked to go off to the pub after work. Being alone with children to look after, housework to do, and meals to prepare was not a happy time for me, and with no car to get out and about or even to the supermarket, I would find myself crying a lot and feeling despair that life was not good and that there was no way of making it better.
Being so young, and add to that being a typical bloke, my husband enjoyed meeting up with his mates and didn't stop to think how it was for me, stuck at home with nothing but work and the kids to deal with. After a couple of years of this life, I tried to explain how I was feeling, and I would ask him not to go out, but usually this ended up with us in a full-on argument and him storming out. Our marriage consisted of really good days and really bad days, and this went on for a good ten years. We lived a pretty bizarre life compared to most people.
I won't go into all the many dramas we went through, but one major one was when we decided to move from New Zealand to Australia when we were in our very early twenties, back in 1979. My husband's brother was in Australia, and we decided we'd move over, as we felt there were better opportunities there for us. Our two children were aged three and four; I was twenty-two at the time. We didn't own a home, but we had just finished building up a houseful of furniture and appliances that had taken us the whole five years of our marriage to pay off; we had to sell everything we owned, and of course when you sell second-hand stuff you don't get too much for it.
So off we went with just a suitcase each and four thousand dollars to our name. Needless to say, it took a lot longer to secure jobs than we expected. Our money was just about used up by the time we did get work, and the balance went toward paying rent and bond on a rental house. Having been staying with my husband's brother and his partner, with only a small bedroom for both of us and the kids, we were a bit excited to be moving into our own space. We had no furniture or appliances and could afford to buy only some second-hand mattresses to sleep on, some sheets, and some cheap dishes and cutlery from Kmart. On our first night in the house, I woke up around 11:00 p.m. to find the whole place — walls, floors, ceilings — crawling with huge black cockroaches! We couldn't get out of there fast enough!
We then moved into another rented house that we shared with friends and their children. It was in a better class of neighbourhood and was a better house, but we still had no beds or furniture. After a few months of this existence and not having saved any money, we had to make a hasty exit from Queensland; a couple of misdemeanours with the law in this "police state" had us scared that my husband would end up in prison so we decided to skip over to the next state one night. The misdemeanours were just for driving and vehicle registration issues, but we had heard many things about the Queensland Police, which got us pretty worked up. So we packed what we could in the old Holden we'd bought, bundled up the kids, and headed off to Sydney.
It was going to be an overnight trip, but we had only sixty-five dollars to our name, so we slept in the car. The next morning, we headed of from Coffs Harbour. It was a lovely day, and the cicadas in the gum trees on both sides of the motorway were deafening, so it was not our fault that we hadn't heard the sirens of the police car behind us. When my husband finally saw the flashing lights in his rear-view mirror and pulled over, the police officer was not in a great mood, and he ordered us to follow him back to the post office at Coffs, where he made us pay an instant fine of — guess what — sixty dollars! That left us with a grand sum of five dollars to last us until our friends were due to arrive in Sydney three days later; they were going to pick up my husband's final pay from his work and bring it to us. They too felt like making a change and wanted to see what Sydney had to offer.
We arrived in Sydney, used a couple of dollars to buy some chips, and for three nights slept in the car in the car park at Bondi Beach. Not what I would call great parenting, but we had no choice, as we had no money. Our friends didn't arrive the day we expected them to, so we found ourselves in dire straits with absolutely no money left. Our only option was to seek assistance of some sort from government welfare, so we went to their office to see if we could apply for some benefit assistance. We were taken into the office of a woman welfare officer, and we told her of our plight. My blood nearly ran cold when she picked up the phone and I heard her say, "I don't really want to split them up." My instinct was to just get up and run with my kids out of there as fast as I could but as the situation whirled around in my head, I just sat there, stunned.
We were lucky. We were given a room at the Salvation Army Hotel and three fantastic meals each day for the two days we were there. What a gift from God that truly was. We have never forgotten the help we received at that time and have done the best we can over the years to try to give back to the Salvos as well as other charitable organisations.
Thankfully my husband's pay came through with our friends, and we were able to go and rent a van in a caravan park. My husband found work, and we managed to muddle through some more. Eventually, though, this life, where I had no friends or family, cooped up in the confines of an old caravan and having to walk to the communal washing and toilet facilities so many times a day, became too much for me, and I took myself and my children back to New Zealand. I left my husband at that time because I felt he was spending too much time out with his mates rather than with me and the girls and wasn't doing enough to find us a better standard of accommodation as far as I was concerned. So back to my parents' house I went. I found a job at the tax office and began to put some money aside so I could move into my own place.
About six months later, my husband and I got back together and worked towards getting our own home, which we managed to move into two years later. With owning a home, though, came the stresses of having a mortgage, rates, and insurances to pay. We both worked full-time, but there never seemed to be enough to pay everything, and that's when my mind started to say, "Enough, I don't want to play this game any more," and I spiralled into depression. My depression was one where I would be okay for a few days or a week sometimes, or even a few months, but then I would spend days or weeks in my mind going over and over things that had happened, things that I wanted to happen, asking myself "Why me? Why us?" I had so many worries. The bills were overwhelming, and my parents were divorcing, I felt that I had no support. I didn't like having to go to my job each day; I wanted to be home with my children, not away from them, as it was difficult to find someone to watch them after school and during the holidays. My neighbours all seemed to be able to go and buy furniture and new cars, whereas I was struggling to make ends meet. I pushbiked to the train station and caught a train to work, whereas the other women in my street didn't even have to go to work. Then there was work itself. Try as I might, I was always unsuccessful whenever a promotion was available. I felt I had the potential to be so much more than I was, but I was never given the opportunity. All these things and many others were a constant cause of my depression.
Depression was not a new thing for me. I had suffered bouts of depression most of my life, and at one time I got so low that I did actually attempt suicide — and I am thankful I was unsuccessful! The thing with being depressed is that no one can possibly understand why you feel the way you do, because you don't want to talk to anyone about it. Well, I didn't, anyhow. Sometimes when it was really bad I would just retreat within myself to my own thoughts and I would sit for days, taking sick leave from work, doing absolutely nothing except getting the kids off to school in the morning and making their dinner at night. The rest of the time I spent sitting in a lounge chair, alone in the silence of my mind. Or, on the days I had to work, I would just go through the motions like a zombie. I have no idea what would pull me up out of my sadness, but eventually I would come right and be able to mix in with the rest of the world around me again. It will sound strange to you, but I actually now believe that in a way depression helped me. It made me question what the point in living was and subsequently led me to search for answers, which then brought me to spiritualism and metaphysics, which have helped me to be the person I am today.
The terrible thing about depression, though, is that once you get to a point where you see no light at the end of the tunnel, you can succumb to the dark thoughts of suicide, and unfortunately I was at that point twice in my life. Although one of these times was when I was still in my early teens and I didn't really know what I was doing, I swallowed a whole packet of painkillers before going to bed, thinking that I would just die quietly in my sleep. I woke up the next morning surprised to find myself unaltered in any way. Then I went about my day as usual, a bit annoyed that I was still alive but not planning on making another attempt at ending it all. The second time I went quite a bit further and slit one of my wrists, but before I could do the other, my husband came into the bathroom and stopped me.
Thinking back on those times now, the thing that really shakes me up about suicide is that someone can be in that state of mind and take such a drastic action all in the space of a few minutes, and unless there is someone there to put things right, that person could well end up gone from this world. It takes just a very short space of time for the damage to be done, yet, as is evident from my own case, people in such a state of mind can, if given the opportunity, move forward to live happy lives, if only there is something or someone that is able to stop the action being taken in those few minutes. I was lucky in that I was not in the house alone and I was found very quickly, before real damage could be done. But there are unfortunately many who are not saved from themselves as I was.
So many of us suffer from depression, and I have to wonder, now that I know what I know, if this phenomenon could be due to us not being in touch with our inner truth and not living our true lives. Certainly, since I have learnt to live by the truth within me, I have not suffered any bouts of depression. Now that I have found myself, I feel empowered and feel that I can cope with anything, I have no fears, and I am accepting of everything that this world gives — yes, even the awful things that are going on in the world. I'm not saying I like these awful happenings; I am merely accepting that this is the way of the world. I pray every day that goodwill prevails, and I believe that all I can do is be the best I can, and that I cannot change the world but I can change me.
When I was functioning okay, I got on with life as most of us do, worked full-time in an office, drove the kids to various afterschool activities, and socialised on the weekends with family and friends, and all seemed pretty normal. There was, however, always a little part of me that was never really happy. My life was not as I truly wanted or expected it to be, and it was as if a part of me felt that I couldn't cope with being in the world that I was in, so that part of me was trying to find an alternative. What was I searching for? I guess you could say I was searching for me! I suppose I could explain it as having a void in me that I was totally unaware of on a conscious level. This void was causing me go through life less than completely happy, and because of this I was often depressed and always wanted to make changes in my life. My need for change was almost obsessive-compulsive, and I changed major things in my life often. I think my need for change was an attempt to find a better place for myself. The only problem was that each time I made a change, it didn't help me feel any better!
I couldn't stay in one place for too long, and consequently I have moved houses thirty-one times in thirty-four years. Sometimes I moved three or four times within a year! I validated my reasons for these moves on a conscious level in many ways; either I just didn't like living in the house or I didn't like the area. I once justified a move by thinking that I needed to move the kids from the area because I thought the schools were not up to standard. Another time I felt I needed a sea change. One of the more dramatic reasons was that I had to leave my husband for a while, as I needed to be on my own. Another time I decided to move overseas! I looked at everything from the perspective that if I didn't feel right, it was because the environment I was in was not good or that the people in my life were causing the issues I was facing. Everything that was not right in my life was, I believed, due to reasons beyond my control and due to actions of other people.
